Re: [gtkmm] Talk about a major rewrite

[Michael Babcock <mbabcock la creatureshop henson com>]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
> If GTK is a piece of crap, what's better?  It's so much better than
> other toolkits I've used, that calling it a piece of crap seems, well,
> stupid.

As I said, the Fresco API is better. It was designed, whereas Gtk seems 
to just have... happened, with new bolt-ons added as needed. Just one 
example: there have been THREE different list/tree widgets over the 
development of Gtk, and STILL NONE OF THEM WORK FOR ME. SHOULD I WRITE 
MY OWN, A FOURTH ONE NOW? I'm not yelling at you but I'm trying to show 
that my frustration is not un-justified. I have been using gtkmm for a 
long time.

> <snip>
>
>  > Maybe I'm just being too picky, and I am picky when it comes to 
>  > programming, but it is striking to me that I don't feel this almost 
>  > constant frustration with any other library that I regularly use, such 
>  > as the C++ standard library, Unix networking functions, 3D scene graph 
>  > libraries, OpenGL, sound libraries, POSIX threads, etc. In all other 
>  > cases I can (eventually) perceive an underlying concept behind the 
>  > design, appreciate the designer's work and implement my program using 
>  > their library. With gtk I am mostly cursing the simplistic design and 
>  > trying to find workarounds to do what I want.
>
> I notice STL is conspicuously absent from the above list...  now,
> THERE'S a piece of crap (pulling the trigger on my flamethrower).

No, I include it in the "C++ standard library". I have no problem with 
STL, I use it a lot and it works well. Again, you may not like the 
design, but at least it had one, instead of "oh, I guess we need this 
function for the Gimp, let's add it."

> My own reaction, in general, is that I like a fully imperative
> programming model, I think in terms of that model, and I find an
> event-driven model is just plain weird.  But all the toolkits use one,
> and of the toolkits, GTK is the one that seems the most intuitive to
> me.  gtkmm then takes that, and does what I regard as a really nice
> job of wrapping that in the language it's more natural for in the
> first place.

Gtk is good for quickly packing some widgets in boxes, hooking them up 
to code with signals and having a decent looking and working simple 
application  running. Beyond that, I run into problems, such as when I 
don't want the default widget behavior or settings, I need to represent 
many objects efficiently with full interaction, or when the "container 
is layout" model is too simple. Again I am reluctant to start 
exhaustively going into details because it would take too long and there 
isn't much point. This is really just a rant anyway.

Bringing this back to gtkmm a little, part of the reason for Gtk's 
weaknesses may be the habits of C programmers. They made a C object 
system, but unlike with gtkmm it is still not typical for C Gtk 
application programmers to derive new custom classes for their needs as 
gtkmm programmers would. Note also that Gdk did not originally use their 
own object system. So despite having it available, maybe it's still not 
natural for C programmers to think to use object-oriented design 
techniques at first.

--
Michael Babcock
Jim Henson's Creature Shop